Indistinguishable from Magic

Earthquake It seems a little grumpy to criticize this spell. It does just what it says it's going to do! It makes an earthquake! It knocks people over, it drops people into a hole in the ground, and it destroys buildings! What's not to love? Well, I mean...it's an 8th-level spell , and it's a pretty big investment for something that only effects an area the size of a football field for one minute. Not that that's bad! It's fine. It's fine ! Maybe you got a couple hundred people chasing you because you ass-grabbed the king's daughter, and you don't happen to have a ton of time or C-4. So you throw an extremely localized earthquake at them.  It's...it's fine.  I don't know. Maybe I'm just hard to please.  Real-World Rating:  7 (Effective) Eldritch Blast One of the things that D&D's 5th edition improved -- or ruined, depending on your perspective -- was the relative offensive weakness of low-level spellcasters. Well, you don'...

Dominate Beast Whether or not this is a good spell depends on what you're trying to get out of it. If the idea is to befriend an animal, this one is a good shortcut to spending several months training it, although, really, what are you going to do with a trained animal beyond being friends with it? You came to a world without magic to win , not to make friends! With a bear! If the idea is to neutralize an animal that might otherwise be a threat, though, just shoot it*. Real-World Rating:  5 (Effective But Limited) Dominate Monster Ain't no monsters. Ain't nothin' to dominate. Real-World Rating :  1 (Worthless) Dominate Person As a front-door mind control spell, this isn't bad; as a back-door mind control spell, it's even better. This does the same basic thing the other Dominate spell, but there's a way to short-circuit your target into total meat-puppet mode. It doesn't last very long, and there's a Save vs. Wisdom, but there's never a bad way to...

Disintegrate Now we're talking ! "Disintegrate" is just what it says on the label: point your finger at something (or, ahem, some one ) and they take a whopping 50-100 hit points of damage -- enough to kill almost anything, or to destroy anything on the downside of a garbage truck -- and that's if  it makes a saving throw. Otherwise, it gets reduced to a tiny smoking heap of dust, like when Marvin the Martian's ray gun gets turned backwards on him. It gets even better at higher levels; it takes a near-miracle (literally) to undo the damage; and it's only a 6th-level spell! This one is real-world platinum, baby. Load up on these and you can take out a small army. Real-World Rating:  10 (Essential) Dispel Evil and Good This one, again, is one that was tenuous at best in early versions (contingent on whether or not you think D&D's arbitrary but unbreakable definitions of good and evil apply to the real world), but in this version, is just a huge dud. Reme...

Destructive Wave Aside from sounding like a pretty cool metal sub-genre, this is the classic thing that Thor did in the old comics: you whack the ground and a big blast of thunder emanates out from the spot, knocking everyone in sight flat on their asses.  Good damage potential on this (up to 60 HP) and half damage even with the save, but the best part is that the damage is selective  -- unlike the blunt instrument that is a Fireball, you can pick and choose who gets teakettled by it. I think you should get an extra 2d6 damage if you holler "KABLAMMO!" or something as you cast it*, but it's a good solid spell just the same. Real-World Rating:  8 (Very Ineffectual) Detect Evil and Good I don't want to get into a big thing here, but the utility of this spell (as well as a lot of the corridor of Detects that we're about to enter) is entirely contingent on the fact that in the D&D universe, good and evil are quantifiable characteristics like height or nationality....

Dancing Lights In theory, this spell -- a cantrip that lets you create four manipulatable orbs of false fire -- has a lot of uses: illumination, distraction, illusion, etc. In practice, though, I feel like it would mostly be used for pranks. Whoever is the Faerûn equivalent of Johnny Knoxville (Nahum Gundbarg or some fucking thing) probably gets a lot of mileage out of tricking horny rogues into making out with Dancing Lights. Real-World Rating:  3 (Pretty Ineffectual) Darkness There's obviously a lot of utility in being able to create an area of pure, impenetrable darkness which can't be dispelled by any nonmagical means, especially if you're the only magician in existence. The clownish exemption for this spell is that like a light spell, it has to emanate from a specific object, which you can nullify the spell by throwing a towel over . Lame. As an aside, it doesn't say what the verbal component of this spell is, but I like to think it's saying "Darknesses!  ...

Control Water The effects of this one, particularly the flood aspect, are so sensational that you can almost lose sight of the fact that it doesn't have a lot of practical applications unless you hire yourself out to the city to do civil engineering on the cheap. Admittedly, if you're looking for a distraction or a way to cause mass havoc, causing an entire city to face post-polar-icecap levels of water damage, or crashing a huge wave into the middle of downtown, are pretty good. The main problem is that you face all those same circumstances, so unless you put together a bunch of peripheral spells (Breathe Water, Swim, etc.) or a Contingency or three*, you're literally going to be in the same boat as your enemies. Still, a real doozy for a 4th-level number. Real-World Rating  5 (Effective But Limited) Control Weather Rather the opposite of Control Water, Control Weather is a high (8th) level spell that sounds amazing, but in fact is much less effective than it seems. For on...

Conjure Barrage Do you like to throw a dagger at people?* Do you like to throw, like, two hundred  daggers at people? Well, then, this is the spell for you. It's another low-damage, high-save-potential spell, and it isn't going to do that much in a real-world setting but look cool, but, I mean, it's going to look really cool .  Real-World Rating  5 (Effective But Limited) Conjure Celestial Since we're in the "Conjure" section of the alphabetical listing of spells in the Player's Handbook , be prepared for a bunch of "see above", but here's the basic situation with summoning spells. Although they're hit-or-miss in the D&D game itself, they're completely devastating  in the real world! Nobody has any experience with celestials or any other kind of non-normal creatures, and a lot of them require magic to even damage them. And guess who has no magic in the real world? Everyone ! Everyone but you!  Even at low levels, this is creating ...